RightScale Blog - vSpherehttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/tag/vsphere
enRightScale at re:Invent: How to Manage AWS, VMware and Hybrid Cloudhttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/rightscale-news/rightscale-reinvent-how-manage-aws-vmware-and-hybrid-cloud
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</div> <!-- /.easy_social_box --><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>The ability to natively manage workloads across VMware vSphere, AWS, and other clouds from a single pane of glass is a topic that we’ll be covering this week at AWS re:Invent in the session <a href="http://pages.rightscale.com/2014-RS-at-AWS-reinvent.html?utm_campaign=701700000011hqZ&amp;utm_medium=blog" target="_blank">AWS and VMware: How to Architect and Manage Hybrid Environments</a>.<br><br>In their Thursday, November 13, session at 3:15 PM, RightScale Principal Cloud Architect Brian Adler and RightScale VP of Product Rishi Vaish will discuss common hybrid cloud use cases, how to cloud-enable VMware vSphere, and how to achieve cloud portability. Plus they will demo a single-pane-of-glass solution for managing hybrid cloud environments. Following is a preview of the topics they will be covering in depth.<br><br><span style="font-size:18px;"><strong>Hybrid Cloud Environments Have Arrived</strong></span><br><br><a href="http://www.cio.com/article/2843855/hybrid-cloud/modern-cio-hybrid-cloud-netapp-ciobp.html" target="_blank">As CIOs increasingly recognize the value of hybrid IT architectures</a>, the end goal of many enterprises is choosing technologies that efficiently enable hybrid clouds. Namely, technologies that provide push-button self-service access to standard stacks and common applications across multiple clouds combined with enterprise-grade controls.<br><br>IT teams evaluating where to deploy existing workloads in hybrid environments can choose from several options:</p><ul><li><strong>Multi-Cloud Management: </strong>Enterprises have existing workloads in VMware vSphere, AWS, and other clouds that they want to to manage natively across multiple clouds and VMware vSphere — that is, they want to see and manage these workloads from a single pane of glass and they want to provide self-service access with the requisite controls.</li><li><strong>One-Way Migration:</strong> Enterprises want to migrate workloads from VMware vSphere to AWS or vice versa because they are often looking to get out of the business of managing data centers and get onto AWS or another public cloud. Or in some cases they want to move “shadow IT” apps from a public cloud to their private clouds.</li><li><strong>Ongoing Portability:</strong> Enterprises need the flexibility to&nbsp;be able to move workloads among their various resource pools at any time. Many want to leverage specific resource pools at different points in an application lifecycle (such as public cloud for dev/test vs. private cloud for production) while others need to run workloads on specific clouds to support specific geographies. And some want to preserve choice so that they can move to other clouds or hypervisors as the market evolves or cost models change.</li></ul><p><span style="font-size:18px;"><strong>Why VMware Isn't the Same As Cloud, and What to Do About It</strong></span><br><br>Over the past several years many enterprises have described their legacy virtualized environments as “private cloud.” This relabeling of existing technologies, with encouragement from vendors, doesn’t address the functionality gaps between virtualization and cloud:</p><ul><li>Rapid self-service</li><li>Migration and portability across cloud and virtualized environments</li><li>Support for DevOps and configuration management</li><li>Single pane of glass for management, visibility, and governance</li><li>Cost and capacity management</li></ul><p>Many enterprises are looking for a faster path to self-service access for virtualized environments, often called virtual automation. The goal of virtual automation is to speed deployment of frequently used workloads, such as those for development, testing, training, and demos.<br><br>Enterprises want to leverage their significant investments in vSphere virtualized environments while combining these resources with AWS or other public clouds for workloads or use cases where the public cloud provides a superior service advantage over on-premises computing, including variable, scalable, and global workloads. They also want to maintain portability between disparate cloud and virtualized environments to avoid lock-in to any particular vendor and enable flexibility in future choice of hypervisor and cloud provider.<br><br>To this end, RightScale has developed a solution to cloud-enable vSphere so that enterprises can exploit the full value of vSphere, including the potential to vastly decrease operating expenditures relating to virtual data center operations. We’ll be discussing this in detail at our <a href="http://pages.rightscale.com/2014-RS-at-AWS-reinvent.html?utm_campaign=701700000011hqZ&amp;utm_medium=blog" target="_blank">AWS re:Invent session</a>.<br><br><span style="font-size:18px;"><strong>Portability: A Possibility or a Pipe Dream?</strong></span></p><p>Compelling reasons why enterprises seek application portability across hybrid clouds include the need for lifecycle-based cloud deployment, cloudbursting, disaster recovery (DR), and supporting multiple hypervisors. Migrating an existing virtualized application to a cloud is certainly possible and can often be the best option for some use cases, but there is no VM import or image translation tool that will enable you to do this fully with just&nbsp;a push of a button.<br><br>In the course of helping our customers move many virtualized applications to and among various clouds including AWS, we developed&nbsp;the <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/products-and-services/multi-cloud-platform/vsphere-cloud-appliance" target="_blank">RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere</a> to make it much easier to manage&nbsp;a&nbsp;vSphere environment as if it were a private cloud. The&nbsp;lightweight virtual software appliance runs on-premises and connects RightScale to your vSphere environment. It delivers a compute cloud API on top of VMware vSphere and adds cloud-like capabilities that expand and simplify access to vSphere.<br><br>During <a href="http://pages.rightscale.com/AWS2014.html?utm_campaign=701700000011hqZ&amp;utm_medium=blog" target="_blank">our&nbsp;session at AWS re:Invent</a>, we will discuss the latest release of RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere and how you can take advantage of the new features to automatically discover and add cloud-like constructs to vSphere resource, import existing virtual machine images into the RightScale Self-Service Catalog, and offer on-demand provisioning to internal developers and cloud users.</p><p>Update: If you missed our session at AWS re:Invent, we cover this same topic in our on-demand <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/webinars/aws-and-vmware-how-to-architect-and-manage-hybrid-environments" target="_blank">webinar on creating hybrid environments for AWS and VMware</a>.</p><div class="drupal-embed" delta="ai_blog_ads-embed_ad" embed_type="block" module="views"></div><p><br><br>&nbsp;</p> </div></div></div>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 20:41:18 +0000Angela Tripp428 at http://www.rightscale.com/bloghttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/rightscale-news/rightscale-reinvent-how-manage-aws-vmware-and-hybrid-cloud#commentsCloud Migration and Portability: What VMware and AWS Aren't Telling Youhttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/enterprise-cloud-strategies/cloud-migration-and-portability-what-vmware-and-aws-arent-telling-you
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</div> <!-- /.easy_social_box --><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>A few days ago Amazon&nbsp;announced its new <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-management-portal-for-vcenter/" target="_blank">AWS Management Portal for vCenter</a>, which allows VMware users to manage AWS workloads from vCenter and to import VMware golden images to AWS using its VM Import utility.&nbsp;VMware responded with a <a href="http://cto.vmware.com/dont-be-fooled/" target="_blank">“Don’t Be Fooled” blog</a>, noting that AWS provided “no easy way to move workloads back to one of your data centers, or to another cloud provider.” The blog went on to suggest that VMware was a better option for cloud migration and portability.</p><p>So first, the hard truth: Migrating an existing virtualized application to a cloud, while definitely possible and often a very smart option, is not a push-button affair — no matter what VM import or image translation tool might exist.&nbsp;And we can say this because we have been doing multi-cloud for a while.&nbsp;We’ve helped customers move many real-world applications (not just those simplistic applications a cloud provider will show you in a demo) to a variety of different clouds and between clouds&nbsp;—&nbsp;so we’ve got a few thoughts and experiences to share. Because we are focused on supporting all of the infrastructure resource pools that our customers use, we recently <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/products-and-services/multi-cloud-platform/vsphere-cloud-appliance" target="_blank">added support for managing VMware vSphere environments</a> alongside our support for AWS, Azure, OpenStack, and other leading public and private clouds.</p><p><span style="font-size:18px;"><strong>How to Approach Cloud Management, Migration, and Portability </strong></span></p><p>When you migrate existing applications from a VMware virtualized environment to the cloud,&nbsp;there is inevitably going to be some level of re-factoring involved in all but the most simple apps. Sometimes the refactoring is simple and the ROI is clear,&nbsp;and other times it is not. A tool that translates an individual VM into another format may help get you part of the way there, or it may not help much at all. But it is not&nbsp;sufficient, on its own, to get any but the most basic&nbsp;application running in&nbsp;the cloud.</p><p>In helping our customers assess applications they want to migrate to the cloud, we consider how the application is architected and its critical dependencies. These include:</p><ul><li>Operating system versions</li><li>SSL termination</li><li>Clustering of load balancers</li><li>App clustering</li><li>Multicast</li><li>Shared file systems</li><li>Static IPs</li><li>Licensing</li><li>Tenancy</li><li>Scale-down logic</li><li>Bandwidth</li><li>Virtual IP requirements</li><li>Multi-master database</li><li>Database I/O requirements</li></ul><p>So, if real-world push-button migration to cloud lies more in the realm of fantasy than fact, how should organizations proceed?&nbsp;We have identified three common use cases among our customers. Our approach at RightScale is to provide solutions for all three use cases and to work with our customers to assess which approach is best for which applications:</p><p><strong>1.</strong> <strong>Multi-Cloud Management </strong></p><p><strong><em>“I want to manage natively across multiple clouds and VMware vSphere.” </em></strong></p><p>In this situation, customers have existing workloads in VMware vSphere, AWS, and other clouds. They want to see and manage those workloads from a single pane of glass. They want self-service access combined with enterprise controls.</p><p><strong>2.</strong> <strong>One-Way Migration </strong></p><p><em>“<strong>I want to migrate workloads from VMware vSphere to AWS or vice versa.” </strong></em></p><p>Customers are often looking to get out of the business of managing data centers and get onto AWS or another public cloud. Or in some cases they want to move “shadow IT” apps back from&nbsp;a public cloud to their private clouds. They see this as a one-time move.</p><p><strong>3.</strong> <strong>Ongoing Portability </strong></p><p><em>"<strong>I need to be able to move workloads among&nbsp;my different resource pools at any time."</strong></em></p><p>Customers have a variety of reasons for wanting portability. Many want to leverage different resource pools at different points in an application lifecycle (such as public cloud for dev/test vs. private cloud for production). Others need to run workloads&nbsp;on different cloud platforms for different geographies. And some want to preserve choice so that they can move&nbsp;to different clouds or hypervisors as the market evolves or cost models change.</p><p><span style="font-size:18px;"><strong>Four Ways to Get Started </strong></span></p><p>Most companies will have applications in all three categories above. To get started on your migration to cloud:</p><ul><li><strong>Implement multi-cloud management</strong> to gain visibility and control over current and future cloud environments. Ensure that you can manage applications across your cloud portfolio and your VMware vSphere environments from a single pane of glass.</li><li><strong>Offer a self-service cloud portal</strong>&nbsp;that enables your users to deploy workloads across a curated set of clouds according to your policies. Provide push-button access to standard stacks and common applications across any clouds you choose.</li><li><strong>Leverage a portable multi-cloud framework&nbsp;</strong>for any new applications to ensure that they can be moved freely between infrastructure pools in the future. You’ll need tools to bridge the varying cloud APIs, operating systems, and hypervisors.</li><li><strong>Assess which of your existing applications should be&nbsp;migrated</strong>&nbsp;to the cloud or between clouds by analyzing both business value and technical fit. For example, elastic web applications are going to be easier to migrate than monolithic legacy applications. &nbsp;</li></ul><p>Virtually every enterprise is looking to leverage public and private clouds alongside their existing virtualized environments. The <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/lp/2014-state-of-the-cloud-report" target="_blank">RightScale 2014 State of the Cloud Report</a> showed that 74 percent of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy. Therefore, companies need to develop capabilities to manage across clouds, migrate existing workloads to the cloud, and provide ongoing portability between clouds. A multi-cloud management platform is a critical foundational technology for organizations looking to operate in these heterogeneous environments. &nbsp;</p><div class="drupal-embed" delta="ai_blog_ads-block_5" embed_type="block" module="views"></div><p>&nbsp;</p> </div></div></div>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 16:10:24 +0000Bailey Caldwell386 at http://www.rightscale.com/bloghttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/enterprise-cloud-strategies/cloud-migration-and-portability-what-vmware-and-aws-arent-telling-you#commentsManage VMware vSphere, AWS & Other Clouds from a Single Pane of Glasshttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/enterprise-cloud-strategies/manage-vmware-vsphere-aws-other-clouds-single-pane-glass
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</div> <!-- /.easy_social_box --><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>Our recent <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/lp/2014-state-of-the-cloud-report" target="_blank">2014 State of the Cloud Report</a> showed Amazon Web Services (AWS) leading in public cloud adoption and VMware® vSphere® leading in private cloud. (Yes, vSphere is not really a private cloud, but I’ll get to that in a minute). So it’s probably not a surprise that our enterprise customers overwhelmingly&nbsp;tell RightScale that they want a single system to provision, manage, and govern&nbsp;both <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/products-and-services/multi-cloud-platform/amazon-cloud-management" target="_blank">AWS</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/products-and-services/multi-cloud-platform/vsphere-management" target="_blank">vSphere</a> resources. They have two clear goals for this hybrid architecture. First, they want to cloud-enable&nbsp;vSphere so they they can provide on-demand self-service access for developers to quickly provision&nbsp;virtual machines (VMs) in their virtualized environments. Secondly, they want a single pane of glass to monitor and manage public&nbsp;cloud and on-premises resource pools and move workloads between them.</p><p><span style="font-size:18px;"><strong>The&nbsp;IT Landscape</strong></span></p><p>In most enterprises, the infrastructure team runs vSphere while the app dev, cloud, and DevOps teams typically use AWS and other public cloud services. These teams have independently chosen management solutions that were focused solely on their siloed environments. But now, with strategic cloud initiatives fueling the rise of cloud admin&nbsp;and cloud architect roles, a new, unified&nbsp;approach to&nbsp;cloud provisioning and management is taking&nbsp;precedence to support business and technical objectives.</p><p>Although some smaller&nbsp;companies are moving exclusively to public cloud, the overwhelming majority of enterprises want to leverage their existing&nbsp;vSphere investment because the platform is deeply embedded in the technology strategy. However, as enterprises shift toward a multi-cloud, hybrid IT future, they want to avoid lock-in to any particular cloud provider or hypervisor. As a result, they are seeking to both cloudify existing vSphere assets to make it easily available to their developers and internal users as well as to preserve the ability to migrate workloads to AWS or other clouds as their needs evolve. For a game plan on how to accomplish this, download the white paper, <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/lp/virtualization-to-cloud-white-paper" target="_blank"><em>From Virtualization to Cloud with vSphere, AWS, and Other Clouds</em></a>.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><div class="drupal-embed" delta="ai_blog_ads-block_5" embed_type="block" module="views"></div><p>&nbsp;</p><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><strong>RightScale&nbsp;Cloud Appliance for vSphere </strong></span></p><p>With the general availability this week of <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/products-and-services/multi-cloud-platform/vsphere-cloud-appliance" target="_blank">RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere</a>, we now enable customers to manage workloads seamlessly across vSphere, AWS, Google, Azure, OpenStack, and all of the clouds we support. RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere is a virtual software appliance that runs on-premises and connects RightScale to your vSphere environment. Once&nbsp;you configure RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere behind your enterprise firewall (which takes just minutes), it enables you to manage your vSphere environment as if it were a private cloud. And&nbsp;it also serves to unify your previously siloed resource pools by providing a consistent set of&nbsp;cloud capabilities as well as a common management platform.</p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="true" class="wistia_embed" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" name="wistia_embed" oallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/ybp7ofj7qh" webkitallowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="428" align="middle" width="675"></iframe></p><p>Benefits of RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere include:</p><ul><li><strong>Self-Service Access:</strong> With RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere, RightScale users can now provide their developers with&nbsp;on-demand, self-service access to provision and manage vSphere VMs&nbsp;in a standardized and automated&nbsp;way.</li><li><strong>Migration and Portability:</strong> Using <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-management-best-practices/rightscale-servertemplates-explained" target="_blank">RightScale ServerTemplates</a>™, you can build and configure workloads for use across AWS, vSphere, and other public and private clouds. And you can continue to use existing images and VMs for provisioning into vSphere. There are several compelling reasons for investing in application portability including lifecycle-based cloud&nbsp;deployment, cloudbursting, disaster recovery (DR), and supporting multiple hypervisors. &nbsp;</li></ul><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><strong>Configuration Management and Support for DevOps </strong></span></p><p>RightScale supports the use of&nbsp;automated configuration management tools that&nbsp;can help companies in the evolution from&nbsp;“golden image” production to an infrastructure-as code model. This shift&nbsp;is a key enabler for the growing DevOps development movement that streamlines development and reduces errors through automation and collaboration.</p><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><strong>Single Pane of Glass for Governance </strong></span></p><p>RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere gives IT teams the same governance over&nbsp;vSphere workloads that RightScale provides for other clouds. This includes:</p><ul><li>Standardization of technology stacks and configurations.</li><li>Visibility into who is running what and where it is running.</li><li>Monitoring of running instances.</li><li>Tracking and analyzing usage and costs.</li><li>A complete audit trail of changes.</li><li>Control over access to shared resource pools and workloads.</li></ul><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><strong>Cost and Capacity Management </strong></span></p><p>With RightScale, companies can now attach costs to vSphere resources and provide cost visibility (showback); cost tracking and analysis; and cost allocations (chargeback) to business units. Companies&nbsp;can also implement cost quotas and optimize overall spend.</p><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><strong>Support for Greenfield and Brownfield Applications </strong></span></p><p>RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere enables companies to manage existing brownfield vSphere VMs and leverage RightScale tools and expertise as they migrate their applications to the cloud. VMware administrators can continue to use familiar vCenter tools because RightScale syncs with the latest vCenter information. Greenfield applications offer an opportunity to leverage RightScale ServerTemplates&nbsp;as a foundation for future portability.</p><p><span style="font-size:18px;"><strong>Unified Cloud&nbsp;Management Promotes Innovation </strong></span></p><p>In the future, application and workload placement will be constrained from moving among&nbsp;different clouds or on-premises environments by security and business policy – not by&nbsp;technology constraints. The RightScale Multi-Cloud Platform provides a key underpinning&nbsp;toward that&nbsp;end by unifying the management of these&nbsp;disparate resource pools so that you can understand what resources cost, provide governance for usage, and enable end users to have the best resources at their disposal to promote innovation. &nbsp;</p><h2 class="bottom15" style="margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 20px; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; color: rgb(12, 92, 166); font-family: 'Gotham SSm A', 'Gotham SSm B', arial, sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 23px; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">&nbsp;</h2><p>&nbsp;</p> </div></div></div>Wed, 30 Apr 2014 13:25:57 +0000Utpal Thakrar372 at http://www.rightscale.com/bloghttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/enterprise-cloud-strategies/manage-vmware-vsphere-aws-other-clouds-single-pane-glass#commentsIntroducing RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSpherehttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/enterprise-cloud-strategies/introducing-rightscale-cloud-appliance-vsphere
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</div> <!-- /.easy_social_box --><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"> <p>As developers flock to the public cloud, CIOs are seeking to provide private cloud services that leverage their existing investments in virtualization. For many companies, this means taking advantage of existing VMware® vSphere® environments and expertise. However, vSphere and other virtualized environments are not equivalent to cloud. They lack key cloud capabilities, and access is typically limited to a small number of trained administrators. In comparison, IT teams want to leverage cloud services to deliver:</p><ul><li>Near-instant self-service access to infrastructure</li><li>Access to developers and users across the enterprise</li><li>Ability to choose to deploy to any resource pool, whether cloud or virtualized</li><li>Ability to move between clouds and virtualized environments</li><li>Governance and controls over security, policies, and costs</li><li>Automation of provisioning and other processes via API</li></ul><p>The missing piece in the puzzle is the ability to democratize this virtualized environment so that application developers can have the same on-demand access to the virtualized resources that they have become accustomed to from the public cloud. <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/products-and-services/multi-cloud-platform/vsphere-cloud-appliance">RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere</a> is designed to fill this gap between vSphere and the cloud capabilities that enterprises want.</p><p>RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere integrates <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/cloud-portfolio-management/benefits" target="_blank">RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management</a> and the VMware vSphere virtualization platform through a lightweight virtual software appliance. With this appliance, enterprise can leverage RightScale as a single pane of glass to manage applications across vSphere environments as well as leading public and private clouds already supported by RightScale. In addition, RightScale ServerTemplates™&nbsp;enable users to create portable workloads and move them seamlessly between cloud environments and vSphere. As a result, enterprises can maintain the flexibility to choose any cloud provider and reduce vendor lock-in.</p><p style="text-align: center;">&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management" class="media-image" height="253" style="width: 480px; height: 253px;" width="480" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.rightscale.com/blog/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/RightScale%20Cloud%20Portfolio%20Management.png?itok=fzCjed1_" /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:12px;"><em>Enterprises can manage applications across vSphere environments as well as the major public and private clouds through a single pane of glass.</em></span></p><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><strong>How to “Cloudify” Your vSphere Environment </strong></span></p><p>To treat a virtualized environment like a cloud, you will need&nbsp;a cloud orchestration layer that cloudifies your virtualized environment. The role of a cloud orchestration layer is to add cloud functionality such as multi-tenancy governance and standardization of resources to your virtualized environment so that you can gain all of the benefits of cloud computing. Until now, there have been two primary options for cloudifying your vSphere environment: vCloud Director and CloudStack or OpenStack.</p><p><iframe allowfullscreen="" allowtransparency="true" class="wistia_embed" mozallowfullscreen="" msallowfullscreen="" name="wistia_embed" oallowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" src="//fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/ybp7ofj7qh" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="750" align="middle" frameborder="0" height="428"></iframe></p><p><strong><span style="font-size:14px;">vCloud Director </span></strong></p><p>vCloud Director was released by VMware in 2010 but failed to gain much traction with enterprise users. As a result, VMware announced earlier this year that it would be deprecating vCloud Director for enterprise use and migrating some of the APIs directly into vSphere. Although vCloud Director will continue as a product designed for service providers, few enterprises are likely to choose this option. &nbsp;</p><p><strong><span style="font-size:14px;">CloudStack or OpenStack</span></strong></p><p>The second option has been to use OpenStack or CloudStack as a private cloud orchestration layer on top of vSphere. OpenStack and CloudStack both support connectivity to vSphere. They sit on top of vCenter server, communicate with the vSphere environment using vSphere SDK, and expose their APIs&nbsp;on the northbound side&nbsp;for application or cloud management services. &nbsp;</p><p>This standard&nbsp;setup for a private cloud environment&nbsp;will allow you to abstract your vSphere environment from your&nbsp;end users (who would typically have access via OpenStack or CloudStack APIs&nbsp;and/or tools), and, because both platforms support multiple hypervisors, you avoid lock in to a particular hypervisor.</p><p>One significant downside of using either OpenStack or CloudStack to manage vSphere is that they impose some limits on the ability&nbsp;of VMware administrators to use familiar vCenter tools in parallel. CloudStack, for example, requires exclusive access to the vSphere environment that forces all management to go through the cloud orchestration layer. OpenStack allows for co-existence but can not manage instances that are launched through vCenter. Over time, continued development of these open source projects may address some of these limitations.</p><p>While both CloudStack and OpenStack are capable private cloud orchestration layers, they come at a price. The expertise and effort required to implement and maintain either platform is significant. For enterprise teams that are looking to cloudify existing vSphere environments, a lighter-weight approach can be very attractive.</p><p><span style="font-size:14px;"><strong>RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere </strong></span></p><p>RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere provides a simple, lightweight option for cloudification of vSphere environments. It presents a compute cloud API on top of VMware vSphere and adds several critical cloud capabilities so that a vSphere environment can be managed as if it were an on-premise private cloud. In combination with RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management, it enables enterprises to seamlessly manage applications across public and private clouds as well vSphere environments.&nbsp;</p><p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="media-image" height="331" width="480" typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www.rightscale.com/blog/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/RightScale%20Cloud%20Appliance%20for%20vSphere.png?itok=28iwK2yj" /></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:12px;"><em>With RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere, you can manage a vSphere environment as if it were an on-premise private cloud.</em></span></p><p>RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere is delivered as a software virtual appliance that is designed to be installed on-premise. It is fully contained within a single VM and can be easily deployed on any host. Because it is stateless, the appliance allows for easy load balancing and is well-suited for high-availability architectures. RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere enables you to:</p><ul><li>Present a simple REST-based cloud API</li><li>Expose cloud-like constructs such as instance types (small, medium, and large, for example) which don’t exist in a vSphere environment</li><li>Using the APIs, RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management can provide a single pane of glass across vSphere and other public cloud environments</li><li>Create a cloud-like multi-tenant environment from existing vSphere resource pools</li><li>Enable lifecycle management of new and&nbsp;existing workloads</li></ul><p>The primary design tenet of RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere was to keep things simple for the end user by leveraging the functionality that vSphere handles best, which includes intelligent resource placement (DRS and Storage DRS) and live migration using vMotion and Storage vMotion.</p><div class="drupal-embed" delta="ai_blog_ads-block_5" embed_type="block" module="views"></div><p>&nbsp;</p><p><strong><span style="font-size:16px;">How Enterprises Can Benefit from RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere </span></strong></p><p>As part of your portfolio of clouds, RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere is seamlessly integrated with RightScale Cloud Management to provide&nbsp;visibility and lifecycle management and governance capability for both new and existing workloads. It is also integrated with <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/products-and-services/products/cloud-analytics" target="_blank">RightScale Cloud Analytics</a>&nbsp;so that you can visualize, forecast, and optimize costs across across vSphere data centers as well as other clouds in your portfolio.</p><p>The primary benefits that RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere delivers are:</p><p><strong><span style="font-size:14px;">Self-service access across cloud and virtualized environments:</span></strong> vSphere environments have traditionally been controlled, configured, and managed by IT. With RightScale&nbsp;Cloud&nbsp;Appliance for vSphere, new types of users such as application developers, software architects, and DevOps teams will be able to leverage RightScale to deploy and move workloads across cloud and vSphere environments according to policies set up by IT teams. &nbsp;</p><p><span style="font-size:14px;"><strong>Single pane of glass across cloud and vSphere environments:</strong>&nbsp;</span>Using RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere, enterprises can enable infrastructure teams to manage cloud-based workloads — including major public clouds, vSphere environments and OpenStack and CloudStack-based clouds — &nbsp;from a single pane of glass. As a result, you gain workload portability and the flexibility of choosing a cloud that fits your needs without having to learn a completely new cloud technology or redesign your application. And where private vSphere environment is used in conjunction with public clouds, the management of workload scenarios such as <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-management-best-practices/overcoming-cloudbursting-challenges" target="_blank">cloudbursting</a> and disaster recovery become a reality.</p><p><span style="font-size:14px;"><strong>Enhanced vSphere environments with cloud-like capabilities:</strong></span> Cloud environments offer additional capabilities that go beyond the functionality of virtualized environments like vSphere. RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere adds cloud-like capabilities that expand and streamline access to vSphere. It provides multi-tenancy governance on top of vSphere to allow automated, policy-based sharing of vSphere resources pools by multiple tenants, which is one of the key features of a cloud.</p><p>Each resource pool in the cloud belongs to one and only one tenant and is invisible to other tenants unless specially configured to be shared. Each tenant can effectively receive a partition&nbsp;of the cloud resources that isolates their resources (VMs, volumes, etc.) from other tenants. This capability is equivalent to AWS accounts, Google Compute Engine projects or OpenStack tenants.</p><p>Typically a tenant represents a project, or an environment (such as development vs. QA vs. production), or a team.&nbsp;RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere&nbsp;manages user access through a set of hierarchical accounts that allow for complete control over which users can access which resources, creating a “vSphere cloud.”</p><p>In addition to multi-tenancy governance, RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere also adds constructs that are expected in cloud environments, such as standardized instance types (small, medium, and large) to enable developers to quickly pick from a pre-configured set of infrastructure options.</p><p>In the coming months, additional cloud-like functionality will be enabled by RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere including volume support, volume snapshot, and IP address management.</p><p><span style="font-size:14px;"><strong>Lifecycle management of workloads:</strong></span> As described above, although orchestration layers such as CloudStack and OpenStack can operate on top of vSphere, they don’t provide the complete parallel management that enterprises want. RightScale does not lock you into one management solution. You can leverage RightScale Cloud Portfolio Management and VMware® vCenter Server™ in parallel. For example, developers can use RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere&nbsp;to deploy and manage workloads in vSphere, while VMWare administrators can leverage vCenter. Regardless whether you launch your workloads in vCenter or RightScale, they will be visible and can be freely managed with either tool.</p><p><span style="font-size:14px;"><strong>Reduced vendor lock-in: </strong></span><a href="http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-management-best-practices/rightscale-servertemplates-explained" target="_blank">RightScale ServerTemplates</a>&nbsp;enable you to&nbsp;create workloads that are portable across vSphere environments and other public and private clouds supported by RightScale. This liberates you from getting locked into a particular vendor technology stack and affords you the freedom to pick the best cloud for your workload&nbsp;(and keeps your options open if you change your mind in the future).</p><p><strong><span style="font-size:16px;">Sign Up for Beta Access </span></strong></p><p>RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere supports vSphere 5.1 and 5.5 environments and is currently in limited availability. It is expected to be generally available in the second quarter of 2014. If you would like early access and to talk with RightScale experts who can help you deploy and optimize application portfolios across vSphere virtualized environments as well as public and private clouds, <a href="http://www.rightscale.com/lp/request-demo-vmware-vsphere-aws" target="_blank">request a demo of RightScale Cloud Appliance for vSphere</a>.</p><div class="drupal-embed" delta="ai_blog_ads-block_5" embed_type="block" module="views"></div><p>&nbsp;</p> </div></div></div>Tue, 10 Dec 2013 14:00:00 +0000Utpal Thakrar348 at http://www.rightscale.com/bloghttp://www.rightscale.com/blog/enterprise-cloud-strategies/introducing-rightscale-cloud-appliance-vsphere#comments